We do not have an original copy of the New Testament. The New Testaments we read are translations of the Greek New Testament, which is itself an edited text compiled from several thousand manuscripts that have survived from ancient times. There is nothing at all abnormal about this. Still less is it insidious, suspicious, or grounds for uncertainty about the Christian message. It is, in fact, exactly what you would expect from an ancient text. In addition, the fact that such a large number of manuscripts lie behind the Greek New Testament is a very good thing.

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This is the fourth post in Peter Bolt’s series on the New Atheists. (Read the first, second and third.)

‘Fundamentalism’ is a swear word. It takes many forms, theistic and atheistic. Basically it is rationalism in a different guise.

As is often the case when a word becomes a swear word, there is also a positive sense of the word that lies buried beneath the invective. ‘Queenslander’ means something entirely different on State of Origin night than when I am looking for a holiday destination. A ‘fundamentalist’ (positively speaking) is someone who holds that there are certain ‘fundamentals’ that ought to believed, for these give shape to their world view. In this positive sense, there are ‘fundamentals’ in any branch of knowledge (= science)—whether about God, or not about God.

Within ‘theistic’ circles, there is a ‘fundamentalist’ mindset that includes a very tight definition of what the New Testament (indeed, the Bible) should be like. It goes like this: if the Bible is God’s word and if God is perfect, then the Bible should contain no errors at all. As noble as this sounds, this is to decide the question beforehand. That is, rightly or wrongly, it needs to be recognized for what it is: an a priori argument.

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This is the third post in Peter Bolt’s series on the New Atheists. (Read the first and second.)

There are many slippery words—words that appear to mean so many things, you begin to wonder if they mean anything.

Even ‘science’ can be one that gets quite greasy. It seems pretty slippery in some New Atheist discussion. Without knowing much about science—or Christianity, for that matter—some ordinary people feel that one stamps out the other—or, at least, that they are in serious conflict. On the other hand, a whole string of famous intellectuals (e.g. HG Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould) have, according to New Atheist Sam Harris, “declared the war between reason and faith to be long over”.¹ But Harris is not happy with these intellectuals. He is even less happy with the US National Academy of Sciences, suggesting that science and Christianity should get along, because they are answering different kinds of questions about the world.² For Sam, this is not good enough; he wants the conflict to continue because, in his mind, science has already won.

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This is the second post in Peter Bolt’s series on the New Atheists. (Read the first.)

The New Atheists cannot be accused of being relativists. But their attacks on Christian truth claims still need some careful relativising.

The New Atheists are not talking to Christians, but about Christians—to recruit fellow secularists in the campaign to silence the Christian voice in the public domain. So Sam Harris, in his Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, New York, 2006), writes,

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